Again

373 BOOKS IN REVIEW of the careful and insightful scholarship Miller brings to bear on the subject. I highly recommend it for any waihang interested in a deeper understanding of the relationship between science fiction and the science of the mind.—Nathaniel Isaacson, North Carolina State University Again? Glyn Morgan. Imagining the Unimaginable: Speculative Fiction and the Holocaust. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. viii+214 pp. $120 hc, $35.96 pbk, $86.40 ebk. This well-written and lucid book discusses speculative fiction that references the historical Holocaust through dystopias and alternative histories. Its title addresses one of two particularly common statements about the Holocaust—that it is unimaginable. The other is the cry “Never again!” As Glyn Morgan points out throughout his book, many have imagined it with varying degrees of success, both because it is impossible to forget and because genocides continue to occur. Nevertheless, the tone of Imagining the Unimaginable resists cynicism and instead is both sensitive to the reasons behind those statements as well as alert to the ways in which they are consistently challenged. A number of years ago, I wrote of how alien contact sf often explores the horrors of the Holocaust through a link between genocide and Utopia and how alternate histories generally keep racism and genocide in the background, instead dealing with the rise of fascism (“Utopia, Genocide, and the Other” in Edging into the Future, ed. Hollinger and Gordon [U of Pennsylvania P, 2002], 204-16). Morgan’s concentration on dystopia and alternate history makes clear that “Dystopian and alternative history texts perform [a] delicate balance, remembering while not remembering too precisely, talking about the Holocaust without talking about it, tracing the edges of the trauma to give us some indication of its shape even if none of the details” (10). Thus, they imagine the unimaginable through what Georgio Agamben calls “the aporia of Auschwitz” (qtd. 10). As Morgan goes on to explain, these fictions “allow us to learn something about the Holocaust, to come closer to understanding it, while maintaining the Otherness (estrangement) which the topic insists upon” (13). In addition to its Introduction and Conclusion, the book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter, “Precursors and Early Texts: Swastika Night (1937) and the Myth of Silence,” begins with two obvious mythic precursors, the vile Mein Kampf (1925) and the equally vile plagiarized forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), works that are as fantastic as any speculative fiction. Morgan then moves on to discussions of Katharine Burdekin’s novel, as well as a number of less well-known works from the 1950s that imagine a German victory, including John Wyndham’s posthumously published Plan for Chaos (1951; pub. 2009), Michael Young’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler (1944), C.S. Forster’s “The Wandering Gentile” (1954), C.M. Kornbluth’s “Two Dooms” (1958), and historian William L. Shirer’s speculative essay, “If Hitler Had Won World War II” (1961). These works recognize that although it became more widely explored after 374 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) Eichmann’s capture in 1960 and subsequent trial, the genocidal Nazi project was by no means shrouded in silence before that time. Chapter two, “Problematizing History: The Man in the High Castle (1962), Fatherland (1992) and Making History (1996),” focuses on the three named texts. Only Philip K. Dick’s novel is widely discussed but Morgan makes new and useful points about it and the other two novels. Of The Man in the High Castle, Morgan says that it “locates the Holocaust on a scale of comparable atrocity [suggesting] that it is not temporally inaccessible (it could happen again), nor set apart in brutality and scale (it could have been/could be worse)” (50). Using the novel and a quotation from a 1976 radio interview with PKD, Morgan makes the claim that Dick believed “that within every individual, or at least every group, there is still the capacity for fascistic behaviour,” behavior that is “undeniably evident in societies around the world since 1945 and right into the present day” (49). The two other works, Fatherland by Robert Harris and Making History by Stephen Fry, also “problematize the notion of absolute evil

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Dystopia · Genocide · Literature · Nazism · Racism · Sociology · Subject (documents) · The Holocaust · Theology · Utopia · Gender Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction